It seems to be faster (starts building faster) and gives progress information make lacks. See http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... (for motivation) and https://plus.google.com/108996039294665965197/posts/SfhrFAhR... (for benchmarks). TLDR: Firefox takes 14m to fully build with make and a nop build takes 57.9s, Chrome takes 30m with ninja, but a nop build takes only 0.74s.